Weeknote 13
The final week of Q1, so I used up my remaining vacation allowance and took the week off.
If I was that kind of person, I’d be busy doing a retrospective on my personal OKRs, and planning exactly what I was going to Q2 and how that would contribute to my 5-year goals. But I’m not, so I didn’t.
In terms of vacation, it worked quite well because I can’t actually remember doing anything exactly productive, mostly a lot of time spent searching the various property portals in pursuit of the Next House.
The searching has produced a shortlist, so we spent a chunk of Friday scouting locations and doing drive-by (or more accurately, very-slow-walk-by) viewings. Looking At Other People’s Houses is a very non-German thing to do, so the theory was that having a dog with us would make us look less like we were casing future burglaries.
In practice, it wasn’t a problem - we look like middle-class middle-aged potential future neighbours, not Einbrechern; and as soon as someone hears us speaking English to each other, we get a free pass as weirdo Ausländern anyway.
So far, the buying process in Germany is exactly the same as the process in the UK - it starts with property portals and a lot of “how on earth can they justify asking that much money for that pile of rubble sandwiched between the mainline railway and the Autobahn?”, followed by “OMG have you seen the state of this decor?”
Estate agents are the same the world over, too - the cliches might be written in a different language, but they’re still cliches.
#weeknotes